Saturday, October 25, 2014

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kristin P. Bradshaw

Kristin P. Bradshaw is a language-based writer
and artist who works with poetry, collage, photography and soundscapes. Her
current critical inquiries converge around fragmentation, uses of language in
art, and the tension between immediate and emergent encounters with texts
(including artworks, performances) and experiences, and the ways that
historical, rhythmic, spoken and visual aspects of the English language are
deployed in contemporary poetic writing. Her poems have appeared in journals
such as the New Orleans Review, New American Poetry, Chase Park, and No: a Journal of the Arts, and a letterpress chapbook and audio CD,
“The Difficult Nature of Contemplation,” is forthcoming from Tiger Food Press/Percival House. She holds an MFA from Brown University, an MA in Religion
from Yale Divinity School, and now teaches in the Liberal Arts department at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Burning Deck Press released her
first book, Apologies, in October
2014.

1 -
How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work
compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My
first book took over fifteen years to get out into the world (as a book), and
over that time, I lived in Providence, New Haven, New York City, and Portland,
Oregon. After graduate school, I struggled to find decent work and to get much
traction. I wrote a good bit, put together flimsy copies of inkjet printed
chapbooks. Later I turned to recording sounds, then photography. I listened to
a lot of music (or maybe a lot of the same music over and over again), which is
something that hasn’t really changed in my daily life. Right now, some of my
most recent work includes more “apologies.” And then apart from “poetry” in
book form, I have a separate set of visually based works that meditate on the
iterative process of seeing, writing, and thinking. It feels different in that
I can work with smaller chunks of text, and therefore I don’t have to wait
while my work accumulates into a full series. Technically, I also end up using
different computer programs for design purposes, and different machinery (letterpress)
in order to fully actualize the work (poem-image-print).

2 -
How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

My
cousin is an avid reader, and he gave me a number of books when I was a
pre-teen.One was an anthology that covered
poetry in English generally (so Dickinson, Shakespeare, Milton, but also Henry King and James Wright), and the other covered contemporary American poetry including
a Denise Levertov poem that I adored. While I read novels, essays, plays and
history texts throughout high school, I returned to these anthologies often.

3 -
How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your
writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear
looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious
notes?

I’m
not sure it takes all that long to start a project, but it seems to take
forever to finish. Of course, this is not the case for short individual lyric
or aphoristic pieces, which come rather quickly and decisively, but for the
pieces that make up a series the process seems rather protracted. I used to
work more from notes (usually in a notebook and from scraps of paper, envelopes,
etc.) and compose on a manual typewriter. Now I compose mostly on a computer.

4 -
Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that
end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a
"book" from the very beginning?

A
poem can begin with a phrase or word, just a fragment of something, or it can
begin with a full line. I usually work with the idea of a book or series in
mind from the beginning. When I write occasional pieces, they are often short
lyric-like poems or quasi-aphoristic text blocks. Sometimes they go on to live
in another series, but some are candidates for being employed as part of a
matrix for a printmaking or sound project.

5 -
Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the
sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’m
interested in exploring the idea of what a public “reading” can be, what it
might look like other than a person reading into a microphone or from a
lectern. I’ve always wanted have a reading of a short series entitled “The
Difficult Nature of Contemplation” and place a laptop at the lectern (or
better yet, in a chair, with a glass of water nearby, and a microphone) and
play the accompanying sound project “the difficulty nature” instead of giving a
live/spoken reading. Or, what would it be like to record a selection of texts/poems
and play them in a loop while “the audience” milled around, sat in chairs,
conversed, drank and ate, as if it were an art opening. Audience members could
sit and listen to the loop, or chat, or allow any combination of these things to
occur at once.

6 -
Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of
questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the
current questions are?

I
have some ongoing curiosities. My current critical inquiries converge around
fragmentation, artists’ uses of language, the tension between immediacy and
emergence in encounters with texts (including artworks, performances) and
experiences, and the ways that historical, rhythmic, spoken and visual aspects
of the English language are deployed in contemporary poetic writing.

For
me, in poetic compositions, writers interact
with language, sometimes in an attempt to make sense of the real, even if
through the unreal or dreamlike, and in some cases to describe visual or aural
connections to language, with or without the desire to express sense or meaning
or to “pin” anything down. I understand poetry/poetics in multiple ways, as an
open genre that accommodates lyric and narrative elements as much as it
accommodates fragmentation, collage, systems, and chance. This openness also
allows writers to engage the spirit of inquiry, and I think the questions are
myriad. The critic Marjorie Perloff has suggested that the contemporary unit of
poetry might be the page rather than the line. Following that thinking, I’m
curious about where poetic expression might exist—on the page, in LED displays,
in paintings, or in any number of screens and devices. This multi-planed
understanding of poetry as visual, auditory, verbal and written allows me to
incorporate both traditional approaches to writing and to explore the move from
the line to the page, and from printed material to digital platforms.

Poetry
is a medium through which practitioners of all levels may ask: what can a poem be? and how can a poem or
act of poetic writing operate in the world? In what ways can ‘poetry’ be read
and constructed out of fragments of the mundane: street signs and voices
overhead on the walk home? How is that material transcribed, visually or
through sound? What are some of the techniques employed in making a poetic
writing work? And what are some approaches to writing poetry in the 21st
century? How can methods taken from the long history of versification, from
contemporary writings by Paul Metcalf or Jackson MacLow, and from contemporary
art practices by artists like Johanna Drucker and Jenny Holzer generate useful
ways of interacting with language? Further, what do (and will) new poetic
territories look like? I am interested in these questions and how potential
answers make an impact on the ways that poetic writing may be composed and
considered, and in how language offers a platform (a medium) through which to
translate critical thought into a formalized structure of some sort (an essay,
a novel, a story, a poem, or image, etc.).

7 –
What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he
even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I
suppose that different types of writers will (and should) have different roles
in society (and I’m really referring to American society, or a particular slice
of it). Perhaps contemporary poetry allows writers to connect with their own
capacities to shape words and language to reflect, manifest, or project the
semblance of a fractured/fragmented whole as an object-like thing or idea to be
considered in ambiguity. Perhaps it is suited to investigations of all types of
conflict—matters of the heart, religion, war, political instability — and can
reference experiences ranging from the individual to the communal to the
universal.

8 -
Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or
essential (or both)?

Probably
both. I haven’t had much experience with this in the recent past, but I worked
closely with an editor on a project a few years ago, and her comments gave me
so much insight into my compositional choices (as well as into some of my
shortcomings). I spent a great deal of time revising Apologiesprior to
submitting it to Burning Deck, and before it went to press, Rosmarie Waldrop
and I discussed certain aspects of the numbering system, the deliberate gaps, and
I was happy to preserve the original numbers, but also I found the feedback
invaluable; it helped me better grasp and articulate my intentions.

9 -
What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you
directly)?

CD Wright once wrote this word at the bottom of a short series that I turned in
for review: “Onward.”Indeed.

10 -
How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry via collage and
soundscapes to photography)? What do you see as the appeal?

It
has seemed more natural than difficult, and done sometimes out of convenience,
to move between poetry, collage, photography and sound recordings. I think the
collage work is a sort of hermeneutic strategy/processing of what I’m “reading”
around me, and that the sound work that I’ve done has primarily connected back
to, or been an expression of, written work that I’d done before, as if the text
begged to be translated into a different medium. Photography is usually something
I pick up when I need to see (things in the world) differently.

11 -
What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How
does a typical day (for you) begin?

Typically,
I get up between 7:30-8am, look over email, attend to administrative
things—like obsessing over my calendar—related to my job, and then by 9:30 I am
doing some form of class preparation or grading. I teach in the afternoons this
term, so I go in to campus around lunchtime. If I am not teaching, I follow the
same pattern, but go in earlier than lunch and have meetings or consult with
students, and after a few hours I spend time off campus reading for the next
class or working on curriculum or working on my own research/work. These days
can be especially good for writing. I like to think and write in the afternoon
or at night. My process has changed a bit over the years, as I’ve moved from manual
typewriters to computer/laptop. I keep a document open over a period of time,
and generally get three or four sessions of writing time in during the week.
I’m a slow writer; sometimes I write two or three words (that I keep),
sometimes a few lines or paragraphs, in a sitting. I sit in a chair and listen
to music through headphones. I stare a lot. I sit in a rocking chair and wear
my pants out at the calf. I attend to the advances of the dog until I get her
settled under a blanket, and then I repel the advances of the cat until she
settles on the back of the sofa, or, I fidget with things around me: papers,
books, study debris.

12 -
When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a
better word) inspiration?

Usually
I turn to a different medium, like photography or collage.

13 -
What fragrance reminds you of home?

The
scent of coming rain.

14 -
David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other
forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I’ve
always been curious about the way that music does or doesn’t influence my
writing (process).

And
I am inspired by visual art, from the Bauhaus masters (I wanted to be like
Itten when I was in high school) to Barnett Newman, and from Jenny Holzer to
Glenn Ligon, my work is deeply influenced by visual artists.

I
started college as a music history major, and while I didn’t want to practice
my instrument so much (I much preferred writing and writing and writing), I
have always had a special relationship with music (Zukofsky’s “Lower limit speech/Upper limit music”). While I can’t remember everything I listened to in
copious amounts while I wrote Apologies, I’m sure the list includes Radiohead, Tori
Amos, Roxy Music, Neu, Shostakovich’s String Quartet’s, Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie
and Gnossiene, and William Byrd’s Masses.

15 -
What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life
outside of your work?

Of
the people I know currently, Sarah Jaffe, a musician (formerly of Erase Errata)
and writer (first novel forthcoming from Tin House, 2015), and Kate Copeland, a
conceptual artist working in printmaking, book arts, and alternative
photographic processes.